


alwey a coltes tooth

by dissembler (orphan_account)



Category: Original Work
Genre: First Time, M/M, Mutual Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:27:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26138083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/dissembler
Summary: Lord visits peasant in the dark of night.
Relationships: Gentle English Manorial Lord/Male Peasant He Can't Stop Thinking About - Relationship
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21
Collections: Short August Medieval Exchange 2020





	alwey a coltes tooth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Plaid_Slytherin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Plaid_Slytherin/gifts).



Lionel will never get used to the way the smoke curls without escape in the peasant houses, how it makes his eyes stream. 

“My lord.” Closing the door with both of them inside, Matthew pitches his voice quiet and bows. Both set Lionel’s teeth on edge and Matthew knows this, knows he can’t abide deference or any change from Matthew’s usual exuberance. 

“I’d heard that you were leaving.”

Matthew nods. “I am. Come to stop me?”

He had, he supposes, but now, confronted with the almost emptied room and the tidied workstation, whatever confidence he’d had is out. He feels robbed, somehow, and the feeling revolts him. He had never _owned_ Matthew, even when Matthew had been a serf and bound to the manor; to think of them, of anyone, in those terms turns his stomach. And then Matthew had requested manumission, and that had settled that. Still, though, the feeling makes him churlish. “With what power could I stop you? You are a free man and can go where you wish.”

“Aye.” Lionel thinks he hears a flicker of irony there, and in: “A free man.” Matthew’s eyes fall to the single chair in the room. “Will you sit, my lord?”

He had had better plans for this, but it tears out of him regardless: the words of a boy whose favourite toy is broken or missing, whose favourite friend has turned away. “Am I not good?”

Matthew sighs. “Aye, for a lord.”

He does not think that is what he had meant. “Good for lord but not good enough for you.”

“You are _good_ , my lord–”

“I wish you would call me Lionel.”

Matthew makes a sudden half movement, the kind that in a man of greater years one could assume a palsy, but Matthew is in his prime and strong and Lionel is a man wrecked by thirst and he knows what it looked like, what he hopes it was: the bringing up of limbs before a step forward. Matthew’s hands, by his sides, the clever fast fingers that Lionel has never been quite able to banish from mind since seeing him first, drawn into fists. Lionel watches him tense and relax by turns until he speaks again.

“Lionel, then. You _are_ good, you _are_ gentle. You _are_ far better than…” He cuts himself off.

Lionel can supply the rest; it’s hardly a secret. “Better than my father.”

It’s well known throughout the county that his father, Guy de Arches, had been a hard lord. That, forever wishing to rise above his own, he had thrown banquets and feasts and then punished his serfs when the land simply could not yield enough for the oversized tables. That when Guy had gone to war, and the banquets had stopped, they had been replaced by demands for even higher yields for the manor to sell at market to fund their lord in Palestine and to keep him rising ranks even in the Holy Land. And when Guy came back to live on English soil, only a year before he died, none had rejoiced his return just as none would mourn his passing, save his steward grown fat on others’ toil and misery. Not even Lionel, nor his brothers and sisters, nor even his mother had managed to muster a single tear between them. So with his first act as lord of the manor, Lionel had dismissed that steward and then, though even the new man warned against it, he had widened the selions and writ that the people should sell their surplus at the market rather than to the manor. Gratitude had not been the end, nor loyalty, though they had duly come. He had done it because it was right, part a form of amends after decades of hardship but mostly the start of a brighter life. Better than his father.

And so his mind and heart continue to revolt him as they send unbidden the thought that asks what was all that for if Matthew is leaving him? It moves his mouth without his say-so: “And still you go.”

“There is nothing for me here.”

There is me, Lionel cannot say for fear. For fear of many things. “The people here love you.”

“And I thank them.” Matthew’s hands still tense and release. “But I can make a living in town on my craft just as I can toil in fields, and I know which one I like better.”

With the fast fingers that had snared Lionel’s thoughts, Matthew had been and remains a musician and a luthier, and this room is normally strewn with the instruments that he has made in any spare hour he has. They are all piled now, ready to be put on a wagon to sell and make his first money. He’ll take them away, and Lionel’s bleeding heart with him. 

But there’s one last thing Lionel can offer. “If it is the field you dislike then I will put you forward as reeve; the people will elect you in a heartbeat.” He is losing composure, his eyes no longer just watering from the smoke. “Be reeve,” he says, because he cannot say be mine.

They have been dancing this reel for years, may God forgive them. From the very start they have shared glances at the Christmas banquets, when each of them was pink and loose with wine; they have shared touches as Matthew taught Lionel the beginnings of a song on the vielle, the contact as a brand that he’d felt for days afterward; their fingers have lingered when handing things between them, when Lionel had helped with the harvest once and Matthew had tended the blisters. He knows Matthew that feels it too, he knows that this is not just him. If he sins, just in thought, he does not do it alone. And there can never – will never – be deed. “Be reeve,” he says again, defeated. “They will elect you and I will trust you.”

Matthew takes a knee before his chair and takes one of Lionel’s hands in his. His palm and fingers are as always rough and warm where Lionel’s are cool and brittle. “I’d be a servant.”

“A free man, gainfully employed and... and close.” He shuts his jaw with a clack, turns and drops his eyes to the dirt floor. The desires he has lower men, Lionel has always known this, but he has never felt as low from wanting Matthew as he does asking this. 

Matthew’s thumb passes over Lionel’s fingers and then the thumb and forefinger of his other hand are on Lionel’s chin, bringing his head to face the front and fixing it so Lionel has to look at him. He looks kind, and – what was it that he had said of Lionel? That he was gentle; Matthew looks at him, gently. 

“I thought that’d be what you’d offer, and I thank you for it but I can’t accept it. I’d turn cold if made reeve. I’d have no time to make. Less still to play. Only time to count.”

His own breathing is turned shallow, all his focus dragged to the twin sites of touch as he desperately tries to resist leaning forward. “Then what happens now?” 

The hand at his chin falls away then spans across his collar-bone, but the gesture is not distancing. Instead Matthew leans up and in and presses warm lips to Lionel’s. It’s a chaste kiss, and though meant as a kindness it lodges as a cruelty. Beneath his tunic Lionel aches. 

Matthew withdraws just enough for Lionel to see his whole face, to see the slight shine on his lips and fixate on what put it there. His own lips are creeping, tingling like a limb regaining sensation after a time asleep. “I go, my lord. _Lionel_.”

Matthew leans in again, presses his lips to Lionel's again but Lionel pushes him back. “Don’t play with me. Please.”

“I amn’t.”

The words are earnest, Lionel trusts them, and after them it happens quickly: Lionel surging forward at the same time Matthew does, ending up with Matthew’s hands around his waist lifting him up onto the table. He loses his cloak to make a soft place to lie, then has his tunics pushed up so that hands can find his braies and delve beneath them. Even years from virginity, the hand that ends its quest by closing around him is a shock. Then the motion of that hand turns the gasp to groans.

Lionel grasps Matthew’s shoulder, his arm, seeking a tether, and forces his eyes to stay open lest he convince himself that this is yet another of his dreams. He pushes a hand under Matthew’s tunics to untie his hose and Matthew’s fingers start questing lower; the press of them against his entrance makes Lionel bite viciously down upon his lip to keep the sound in. The last thing they need is the village to witness them. 

Matthew withdraws his hands from the confines of Lionel’s smallclothes to tug both his tunics over his head. He kicks out of his untied hose and comes back to Lionel, pressing him down onto his back on the table and holding his tunics bunched up beneath his chin to bare his chest. He takes a nipple between his teeth and Lionel tastes blood this time at the force of his biting down, but still a low whine escapes him. 

“My l– Lionel, am I hurting you?”

He releases his lip to speak. “No, I pray you continue.” 

After that, as Matthew’s mouth returns to his skin and the hand not holding his clothes up returns to his braies to pull them down, manhandling Lionel’s legs to tug them off him, all Lionel can seem to manage are beginnings: “I need… You can… Please…”

Matthew rights himself, lowers his own braies and slips out his piece. He spits on one hand and offers the other to Lionel, tracing fingertips over his lips until Lionel opens his mouth to take them in. 

“Can I…?”

It heartens Lionel to see that Matthew is struggling too, eager and biting his own lip as he looks at Lionel. Lionel nods vigorously, and though he has never been breached so and thus dimly recognises a flicker of fear he pushes it down. He has dreamt this over again and he has seen enough of Matthew to know that he is safe under his hands, the hands of a craftsman and not those of one who takes and breaks. Matthew will make and mend him. 

When the breach occurs, first by fingertips, slicked with spittle and the thin drops of seed that spring forth before the deed, and then by the instrument itself, the strangeness robs him of breath for only moments. It is only slightly painful and the pain gives over quickly to a fullness that sends heat over his skin and knocks his mind askew. 

Then Matthew begins to move, and Lionel’s mouth falls open around the fingers. His eyes try to close but he forces them to open again, watching Matthew as the heat coils within, pulling him tight like the line of a bow.

Matthew looks down on Lionel as if he too had dreamt and now finds his dream real. “Lionel,” he says, and seems to wonder at the name in his mouth.

“Matthew,” Lionel returns and feels the name familiar but changed somehow, like a beginning.

It does not take much more for either of them, desperation drawing them closer to an edge that for Lionel is crossed the instant Matthew wraps a hand around his prick again. He spills over his belly, the arrow let fly, and feels himself clench around Matthew even with this release. He winces as Matthew withdraws to paint his own seed upon the dirt floor. 

As they pant together in the orange light, the thick air, Lionel pushes himself up onto his elbows to watch Matthew, only in his braies, putter about the room. He returns to Lionel with a cloth which he has dampened and held over the fire. Lionel takes it from him, there will be no service here, and wipes himself down. 

They are quiet, the both of them lost in the weight of the deed, in the bonds that they have forged between them in flesh and sin. But Lionel does not feel low, rather he feels gutted at having had once what he must lose, at the ending this surely must be. He pulls himself up to sitting, and brings his cloak about his shoulders to keep from shivering.

He dares to glance at Matthew and finds him smiling.

Puzzlement must show on his face as, pulling the chair up to the table and sitting down in it, still in naught but his smallclothes, Matthew reaches out and rests a hand on Lionel’s tunic-covered thigh. “I smile because I am happy, and because, once I am settled in town with a house, I shall have a proper bed to have you in.”

Lionel’s heart stops and restarts. He smiles back and thinks of beginnings. 

**Author's Note:**

> Happy SAMEflash! 
> 
> (Reeves were basically placed in charge of the admin of the manor, they were usually elected from the people of the village yearly, though if a reeve was very good at their job they could become permanent. Half accountant and half manager and, presumably, very little fun.)


End file.
